I wasn't trashing ActiveX per se; but rather the idea the label represents, binary embedding in (an expected) document; or binary embedding period. I hope most people read that I dislike the idea, not the brand name.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday August 02, 2010 @03:54PM
from the return-fire dept.

astroengine writes "Yesterday morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a 'filament') erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae — a solar storm is coming."

I use a similar system for personal use but I do not have it wipe all the data on each restart, instead I just wait for the system to start getting a bit sluggish or I am ready for a clean start and restore the original virtual machine. Still kind of a pain but so much better then restoring your whole system. I have been using this setup for a couple years and I have not had to reformat my main system.

Last time I beat a speeding ticket in that state... I paid for it dearly. Six tickets for less than 3 mph over the limit in a month. I find, although morally repugnant, it's much cheaper to pay up now and complain later; rather than to invert the order.

Yes, I am familiar with that idea... the point however is access control. How do you decide the X lucky recipients of your partial key? How do you assume they are trustworthy? Then again, if you're not watching the logs, how to you know they aren't cheating the system, and trying to assemble the full key without your permission?

The whole point of DRM is to give permission when you wish. Any system that allows someone to skip asking permission, and later beg forgiveness is broken. In that same vein, any DRM system gives you the keys at some point, and says "do not unlock this door"; therefore it always fails, even if we use it simply because it's easier to ask then to beg permission.

Perhaps I missed this in the TFA, but how exactly do they plan on actually releasing the keys? The whole point of DRM is to keep the keys out of your reach. I cannot think of a single, viable way to hide the key exchange without some black-box single point of distribution. Sure you can distribute the encrypted content via P2P... but unless the keys are decentralized as well... calling it a P2P system is just a touch disingenuous.

The key-servers still will represent a single point of failure, and a single point of ownership. Now we'll just pay for most of the bandwidth instead of them.

Well, writing on DEC hardware, most of the assembly instructions could be morphed by bit shifting into something else, useful, for example a Pointer Jump was just an overflow from a Jump Not Equal, so you could *cough* theoretically write an infinite looking loop that would exit when a strategically placed variable was overflowed. Thank god people don't write like that now, but when you had a 16k address space to work with, tricks like that were, well indispensable. As for the byte shifting, on a PDP, a bitwise shift (because most instructions began with a null byte) was a fast operator, rather than having to run a real decompressor.